Science Fiction Studies

# 8 = Volume 3, Part 1 = March 1976

Ralph Willett

Moorcock's Achievement and Promise in the Jerry
Cornelius Books

Michael Moorcock has emerged in the
late sixties and early seventies as that rare phenomenon, the popular novelist
whose work has also become a cult among the young and the avant-garde. He
entered Britain’s world of popular culture at the age of 17 as editor of a
boys’ magazine, Tarzan Adventures, and then wrote comic strips for
Fleetway’s popular fiction publications; now over 30, he is compared not only
to Edgar Rice Burroughs but also to William Burroughs, especially with respect
to the Jerry Cornelius books: The Final Programme, 1968, The Chinese
Agent, 1970, The Nature of the Catastrophe, 1971, A Cure for
Cancer, 1971, The English Assassin, 1972, An Alien Heat, 1972,
and The Hollow Lands, 1974.1 Moorcock lacks William Burroughs’
accurate and devastating satire, and his verbal experiments have been less
radical, but in both artists can be observed a basic dissatisfaction with linear
methods of representing space and time, a surreal sense of co-existing multiple
worlds, and an emphasis on apocalyptic disaster.

Moorcock’s eclecticism is a facet of
his work that the reader cannot escape; echoes of other writers abound, even if
the final result and total effect are Moorcock’s own. And the very conception
of Jerry Cornelius as a fluid, metaphoric being erodes the old convention of the
"retrospective" novel (as J.G. Ballard calls it), in which characters
were the property of their creator. Tales about Jerry Cornelius by writers other
than Moorcock appeared in New Worlds, the magazine edited by Moorcock and
Ballard, and were collected, along with some by Moorcock, in The Nature of the
Catastrophe, edited by Moorcock and Langdon Jones. This collection is dedicated
to Borges, and in the introductory discussion of the "real identity"
of Jerry Cornelius, several references are made to the Argentine writer, and
specifically to "The Immortal." The Cornelius chronology at the end of
the book (1900-1968, but with mention of a reference in Vergil!) could well
derive from a similar chronology (1066-1921) in "The Immortal." And
the universe of the Borges story, in terms of history("in
an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men") and ethics
("all our acts are just, but they are also indifferent"), resembles
that of the Jerry Cornelius novels.

The introduction, written from
"New Mexico" by a "James Colvin" is itself a hoax, reminding
us not only of Borges, but also of Poe. Incest (between Jerry Cornelius and his
sister Catherine) with hints of necrophilia also evokes Poe, while in The Final Programme, Jerry’s father’s house, a fake Le Corbusier chateau on the coast
of Normandy, seems sentient, like the House of Usher: "As he looked up at
it, Jerry thought how strongly the house resembled his father’s tricky
skull" (§4).

Other writers come to mind, such as
Donald Barthelme, who is also fascinated with the impedimenta of modern
civilization and creates a tone resembling Moorcock’s, both sad and
nonchalant, and Ronald Firbank, especially in An Alien Heat, set in a
"decadent" future in which people give themselves up to "paradox,
aesthetics and baroque wit." But it is Borges’ juxtapositions of the real
and the imaginary, and above all, the dream-like fictions in which he plays
games with space and time, that are most frequently called to mind. The
following lines from "The Garden of Forking Paths" provide an apposite
transition: "In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with
several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction
of Ts’ui PÍn, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them."2

Since time is relative, not absolute,
any temporal reality is only a possible order of events. Moorcock clearly
appreciates and responds to this perception, mixing "real" news items
with fictive speculations, and in The English Assassin, offering a series
of eight different futures, each in the form of "The Alternative
Apocalypse." The reader is deliberately refused the comfort of sequential
logic by different type faces or by short paragraphs with unrelated randomized
headings. The arbitrary nature of literary beginnings and endings, is indicated
in The Nature of the Catastrophe where the opening of "The Tank
Trapeze" repeats the end of "Sea Wolves." (Both stories are by
Moorcock.) Moreover, "The Delhi Division," also by Moorcock, begins
with the identical sentences opening the chapter "The Hills" in The
English Assassin, although the protagonist is different: "A smoky Indian
rain fell through the hills and woods outside Simla and the high roads were
slippery. Major Nye [Jerry Cornelius in EA] drove his Phantom V down twisting
lanes flanked by white fences." Once again, the limits of the individual
novel or story are challenged. The action is enfranchised and, in its
mirror-image, made more ambiguous. Are we witnessing merely different points in
time or events in identical universes? The knowledge of the two passages is
unsettling like a recurrent dream.

Indeed, modern existence itself takes
on a dream-like quality as the single person, inundated by media images,
experiences a bewildering montage of facts, moods and messages. As one critic
has pointed out, "What Michael Moorcock does is to set them [events and
visions] all down flat, giving equal importance to each; and the effect,
paradoxically, just because life actually is like that, is one of extreme
fantasy."3

The element of the fantastic is
compounded today by radio, TV, magazines and movies, so that our consciousness
may be aware of a variety of time-zones at the same instant. Moorcock will place
his characters in an airship with Art Deco furnishings, but equip them with
modern gadgets such as needleguns and nerve-gas grenades. The English
Assassin begins in 1975, but moves rapidly to the period of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later takes in Una Persson’s appearance as a
music-hall entertainer at the turn of the century, and Mrs. Cornelius’ bank
holiday excursion to Brighton in the 1930s.

Certainly, Moorcock shares in the
nostalgia of the sixties; "camp" in the second half of that decade
made all of the recent past available for evocation. But a sense of irony was
retained, and Moorcock too knows where to draw the line, especially in An
Alien Heat, where an omnivorous nostalgia assists the pursuance of hedonism.
In that futuristic novel, the characters vie with each other to set
"fashions" which will catch on universally and, while capable of
visiting the past, prefer to re-create it. But the past will take its revenge,
as the avatar of Jerry Cornelius, Jherek Cornelian, is plunged into the squalor
and brutality of Victorian London’s slums.

Yet despite the movements in time that
characterize The English Assassin and The Nature of the Catastrophe,
the world of Jerry Cornelius is basically that of the 1960s, "a gift wrapped
throwaway age," as Miss Brunner calls it in The Final Programme [§11], a mixture of dream and nightmare, buoyant, élitist, androgynous,
narcissistic, overpopulated, and either violent itself (the Kray twins), or
permeated by images of violence (Vietnam, the Kennedy assassinations). Although
London in the 1960s was often said to be the most exciting city in the world,
the decade still produced books with such titles as Suicide of a Nation.
Something of that despair finds its way into The English Assassin
(subtitled "A Romance of Entropy") with its newspaper reports of
heroin addiction, car crashes, Vietnam killings, murder and rape, and A Cure
for Cancer, the most anti-American of the novels with its materials of
ubiquitous U.S. military advisers, American internment camps, and paranoid right-wing
rhetoric.

Moorcock’s time travelers act out his
plots in a variety of exotic locations, ranging from Lapland to Cornwall, from
Phnom Penh to Simla. At the centre of this world lies Cornelius’s Time Centre,
set up in a convent in Ladbroke Grove, west of Central London. All the leading
characters in the novels and tales find their way to this part of Notting Hill
(one centre for the Alternate Society in the Sixties), drawn, for one reason or
another, to the Time Centre or to a huge social gathering: Jerry’s party in The
Final Programme at his Holland Park house or the Gala Ball at Hearst’s San
Simeon, rebuilt on the site of the old convent in The English Assassin. These
events are ended by the breakdown of government and by personal violence,
respectively, but it is national violence, along with anarchy and entropy, that
Moorcock usually portrays. The squandering of resources and energy precipitates
the death of the universe; there is a frequent sense of "things narrowing
down," or, as Mrs. Cornelius puts it in The English Assassin: "Everyfink’s
runnin’ art ‘ere. Food, Fuel, Fun" (4). Wasteland images predominate:
in "The Sunset Perspective" (The Nature of the Catastrophe),
New York is described in terms of distant gunfire, collapsing neon signs and
corpses on steel gibbets, and, as cities are destroyed or filled with refugees,
a post-atomic vision like Bob Dylan’s in "A Hard Rain’s Gonna
Fall" (1963) is produced ("guns and sharp swords in the hands of young
children"; "I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’").
This fictional universe is inhabited, indeed "created," by agents and
double agents, alternately manipulators and victims, not always in full control
of theirpowers and technology. It
is this random factor which renders Jerry and the Time Centre vulnerable.

Glamorous, bisexual, capable of colour
change, resurrection, and, from book to book, metamorphosis (the seedy Jeremiah
Cornell in The Chinese Agent, the childlike Jherek Cornelian in An Alien
Heat), Jerry Cornelius would seem, as his initials suggest, to have many of the prerequisites
for a messiah. But only in The Final Programme, where he merges
physically with Miss Brunner, does he take up this role—in The English
Assassin such a suggestion is ridiculed by Colonel Pyat: "A bloody
Teddy boy, more like" (§4). Even as a modern hero, Jerry departs radically
from the Superman image of assertive masculinity. His function—the maintenance
of equilibrium between law and chaos—precludes purposeful action; Jerry likes
everything "how it comes." Enervated when he loses energy, he is
ordinary enough to weep in self hatred, to vomit and suffer from migraine, and
to be captured by the enemy, at which point he is inclined to scream and
whimper. These characteristics were noted by M. John Harrison (one of Moorcock’s
collaborators): in "The Flesh Circle" (The Nature of the
Catastrophe), he has Dr. Naw say to Jerry, "You’re guitars, guns and
glitter, but are you anything else? ... You see yourself as some sort of
power-point—a personal quasar—but you’re down on the floor with the rest
of us, scrabbling among the bones to save your pretty skin..." (§5).

To read the later Cornelius novels is a
distinctly masochistic experience, and beneath the "guitars, guns and
glitter," there is an underlying despair and nihilism. In A Cure for
Cancer, that despair engenders a cynicism which is, in social terms,
deplorable. Captured twice by Bishop Beesley and once by a U.S. government
agent, Jerry abandons humanity to its fate in a private, romantic gesture,
maximizing entropy and diffusion so that his sister Catherine will have
sufficient energy to live a few days longer.

New art forms are called into being
when new material or "content" needs to be articulated. Unfortunately,
Moorcock’s inventive structures (in such works as A Cure for Cancer and
The English Assassin) seem only to celebrate and mock the Sixties
"scene" (an ambivalence characteristic of the period) and to deplore
the violence of the modern world, while recognizing its inevitability. An Alien
Heat, a comparatively conventional narrative novel, is a more considerable
affair, using the future and the past to make a dialectical examination of
freedom and discipline. Even the emissary from the past, Mrs. Amelia Underwood,
an intelligent, hymn singing gentlewoman from nineteenth-century Bromley in
Southern England, has to admit the attractions of the leisured civilization of
the future in which she finds herself: "It was hard, indeed, to cling to
all one’s proper moral ideals when there was so little evidence of Satan here—no
war, no disease, no sadness (unless it was desired), no death, even" (§9).
But despite this concession, Moorcock’s skepticism towards this projected
society, which lives off the achievements of the past and fails to invent
anything genuinely new, is clear enough, and finds expression through another
visitor, Li Pao: "What ghosts you are. What pathetic fantasies you pursue.
You play mindless games without purpose or meaning, while the universe dies
around you" (6).

Jherek Cornelian, whose nostalgia for
the nineteenth century takes the form of pictorial reproductions and an air car
that resembles a small steam locomotive, falls in love with Amelia, follows her
back in time and, Orpheus-like, arrives in the underworld. His experiences among
London’s down-and-outs teach him misery, cold, hunger and fear, so that, on
his return, he is better equipped to to answer his mother’s question (the book’s
first spoken words): "How do you mean, my love, ‘virtuous’?" He
has learnt that virtue has to do with corruption, which in turn has to do with
"not being in control of your own decisions" (§ 14), a widespread
circumstance in nineteenth-century London. With freedom comes the possibility of
choosing responsibility and moral action.

Like John Fowles’ The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, and the detective novels of Peter Lovesey, An Alien
Heat (and its sequel, The Hollow Lands) demonstrates a recent and
continuing interest by contemporary writers in the Victorian period, an interest
at times devoted to the accumulation of documentary detail, but one which also
permits the comparative study of British cultures. The Jerry Cornelius of
"Sea Wolves," dressed in a Diane Logan hat, a yellow Saks shirt, a
brown Dannimac coat, and dark orange trousers from Italy, already seems dated.
But the modernist techniques of the Cornelius books, and the seriousness and
control shown in An Alien Heat, make Moorcock one of Britain’s most
promising novelists.

Michael Moorcock entered Britains’s world of popular
culture at 17 as editor of a boys’ magazine, Tarzan Adventures; he then wrote
comic strips for Fleetway’s popular fiction publications. He has been compared not
only to Edgar Rice Burroughs but to William Burroughs, especially with respect to the
Jerry Cornelius books: The Final Programme (1968), The Chinese Agent (1970),
The Nature of the Catastrophe (1971), A Cure for Cancer (1971), The
English Assassin (1972), An Alien Heat (1972), and The Hollow Lands
(1974). Moorcock lacks William Burroughs’s accurate and devastating satire and his
verbal experiments have been less radical, but in both artists can be observed a basic
dissatisfaction with linear methods of representing space and time, a surreal sense of
co-existing multiple worlds, and an emphasis on apocalyptic disaster. The perspective of
Jerry Cornelius as a fluid, metaphoric being erodes the old convention of the
"retrospective" novel (as J. G. Ballard calls it), in which characters were the
property of their creator: tales about Jerry Cornelius by writers other than Moorcock
appeared in New Worlds, the magazine edited by Moorcock and Ballard, and were
collected, along with some by Moorcock, in The Nature of the Catastrophe, which is
dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges. The world of Jerry Cornelius is basically that of the
1960s—buoyant, elitist, androgynous, narcissistic, over-populated, and permeated with
images of violence.